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HVK Archives: The formation of Pakistan

The formation of Pakistan - Afternoon Despatch and Courier

Kuldip Nayar ()
23 January 1997

Title : The formation of Pakistan
Author : Kuldip Nayar
Publication : Afternoon Despatch and Courier
Date : January 23, 1997

The Council for Defence and National Security, which President
Farooq Khan Leghari, has constituted was never in the scheme of
things in Pakistan. The council will, no doubt, give legal and
explicit role to the military in the country's governance. But it
was never envisaged by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Pakistan founder.

In what turned out to be his last speech, he said at the Quetta
Staff College on June 14, 1948, that "the executive authority flows
from the head of the government of Pakistan, who is the
governor-general and, therefore, any command or orders that may
come to you cannot come without the sanction of the executive
head.' He praised the armed forces of Pakistan but made the
executive head as the final authority.

By then the holocaust of partition was over and many people
questioned Jinnah whether the division of the subcontinent was a
correct decision. 'A division had to take place. On both sides,
in Hindustan and Pakistan, there are sections of people who may not
agree with it, who may not like it, but in my judgement there was
no other solution and I am sure future history will record its
verdict in favour of it. And what is more it will be proved by
actual experience as we go on that that was the only solution..."

But he said he was convinced that 'Any idea of a united India could
never have worked and in my judgement it would have led us to
terrific disaster.' He added: "May be that view is correct; may be
it is not, that remains to be seen."

Contending powers

However, Lord Linlithgow, then the Viceroy, wrote on December 19,
1940: "Once broken into separate and independent entities, India
would lapse into a welter of contending powers in which free
Institutions would be suppressed and in which no one element would
be able to defend itself against external attack."

The Viceroy was, no doubt, opposed to the Pakistan demand. But he
felt that Muslim support for it would keep on growing unless there
was a concrete alternative. And for him, the idea of federation,
which the British had envisaged through the Government of India
Act, 1935, was the best answer.

Congress was not opposed to the idea of a federal structure but it
did not want the scheme to partify British rule and vested
interests in India. The Indian States' Peoples Conference, a
parallel of Congress in Indian states, demanded that
representatives should be elected and not nominated. Linlithgow
conveyed through Ghanshyam Das Birla, an industrialist, who used to
be Gandhiji's host in Delhi, a warning to Congress that any attempt
to change the complexion of the Council of States would encourage a
movement for a federation of the North-West comprising the Punjab,
Sind, and the North-West Frontier Province and the Punjab states --
another form of Pakistan.

He said that 'some influential men had openly advocated such a
proposal in a private session of a Muslim conference in Lucknow a
few weeks earlier. (According to Linlithgow, Birla himself
suggested that the best course might be to let the Muslims have
their federation of the North-West).'

Promised safeguards

The League also did not reject the federation proposal outright,
relying on the promised safeguards and the belief that Britain
would be there to help it. Bid when this expectation did not
materialise, Jinnah told I-Linlithgow that he could not support any
scheme which would "produce a Hindu majority in a federal India'.
However, the opposition of the League or Congress was not very
material. The prince of Denmark in this drama was the community of
Indian rulers. The British put the scheme in cold storage when the
princes rejected it.

Lord Mountbatten told me in London in 1971 that if the princes had
not been so "foolish" as to reject the federal idea, India would
never have been partitioned. This is strange because what were
these princes without British support? They were merely
marionettes in the hands of London. In fact, when Congress
intensified the independence movement in the. states, Linlithgow
himself wrote to the King of England: "When they are attacked we
are bound to give them countenance and, if necessary, protection.

Linlithgow and, for that matter, the viceroys before and after him,
treated Jinnah on a par with Gandhiji, this impressed dissenting
Muslim opinion. Here, not only the British but the Congress also
was to blame because both Gandhi and Nehru again and again held
talks with Jinnah and wrote to him to find out what the League
wanted and what its grievances were.

The more the Congress leaders gave him importance, the taller
Jinnah grew in stature, much to the exasperation and detriment of
other Muslim leaders whom Jinnah was denigrating as 'showboys' of
the Hindus.

Another factor that weighed with the British in giving importance
to Jinnah was that they 'did not want to see the break-up of the
Muslim League' and find themselves "with only one side organised,'
that is, Congress. In a letter to Amery, secretary of state to
India then, Linlithgow said that the Muslims are now a very
substantial and well-organised whole, and they have not the least
intention of permitting progress to be made on lines that the
Congress and the Hindu parties might be prepared to consider."

There is a letter of Amery, dated January 25, 1941, in Linlithgow's
papers, saying: "Jinnah and his Pakistanis are beginning to be
almost more of a menace (than Congress) and to have lost all sense
of realities... If there is to be a Pakistan, Kashmir will
obviously have to belong to Hindu India and the Nizam would
probably have to clear out bag and baggage. The whole future of
his state and dynasty, as in the complementary case of Kashmir,
depends on India remaining united and on a basis of compromise
between Hindu and Muslim."

After failing in his efforts to get the Congress and League leaders
in his advisory committee, Linlithgow tried his best to exploit the
differences between the two parties to prevent any devolution of
power. However, Churchill, then the British prime minister, was
under great pressure from America to associate the Indians with the
war effort. He suggested the constitution of an Indian Council of
Defence which would represent India at the Peace Conference at the
end of the war.

Single entity

He even wanted to fly to Delhi to disclose it directly to the
Indians. But Linlithgow, with the help of Amery, had the project
scotched. He did not want his flock, the Viceroy's nominated
council members, to lose face. This was in February 1942 and it was
evident that till then the British government was thinking of an
arrangement, however defective in substance, for India to remain as
a single entity.

But Whitehall changed its mind very quickly. In about a month
(March 29) Stafford Cripps, a cabinet minister, sent by the British
government to win over the Indian people's support for the war in
exchange for some say in the administration, presented a scheme
which looked like sowing the seeds for the partition of India.

While seeking to transfer substantial powers to India, the scheme
envisaged that "any province that was not prepared to accept the
new constitution" could "retain its existing constitutional
position" and that Britain would be willing to accord to "a
non-acceding province the same full status as the Indian union
itself" and the right. to frame its own constitution.

The Cripps scheme did not mention Pakistan specifically but its
essential ingredients were there. Within two days of Cripps's
arrival in New Delhi, Amery sent a cable to Linlithgow (March 24)
to say: "Jinnah, I should have thought, will be content to realise
that he has now got Pakistan in essence; whether as something
substantive or as a bargaining point, though no doubt the purely
provincial delimitation will want a good deal of adjustment so as
to secure what he calls 'zones'."

In the same cable Amery added: "After all, supposing that Pakistan
dies come off, there will be possibly two Muslim areas, the whole
of the states, Hindu British India (if that does not divide itself
up) and finally at least one important primitive hill tribe
area..."



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